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Traceless Voices
Traceless Voices is the name of a well-known biography of two Xasínan identical twins that were the subjects of a longitudinal psychological study beginning from their births, where they were separated and raised apart by different families, each of them unaware that they had a twin at all despite living in the same city. For the sake of preserving the anonymity of the pair, they were given the pseudonyms of Trace and Voice in reports relating to them, including in the biography itself. It was hypothesized that the culture of Xasína would lead the twins to "linking" with similar individuals throughout their lives; however, much to the surprise of the researchers, the twins never linked with anyone at all throughout their childhoods and young adulthoods. Each reported feeling as though they were "missing" something, and each described it the same way -- that they felt like there was a voice at the fringes of their memory of someone they had forgotten, but the voice vanished without a trace. Both Trace and Voice were described by others around them as "outsiders" that struggled to empathize with others. These feelings intensified as time went on, where their apparent inability to socialize properly marked them as social deviants and outcasts. They turned to crime, particularly graffiti to express themselves; here, the two managed to come into contact, but without ever seeing one another and solely communicating through their graffiti. Both Trace and Voice seemed content with maintaining the status quo they settled into; neither ever sought to meet the other, instead finding solace in this separated method of "speaking" to a kindred spirit. This was kept up for over a decade with both twins never failing to return to leave messages for the other and always failing to return at the same time even by chance. The study took a sudden turn shortly after the twins turned thirty years old -- Trace violently broke into a store and was killed in the ensuing confrontation with law enforcement. Though Voice didn't know about Trace's death in any specifics, it was reported that they felt haunted by a feeling they couldn't quite place, as if they'd lost something important but couldn't figure out what. Shortly after, Voice disappeared, leaving behind just one message on the same region of the city that Trace and Voice had been vandalizing for a decade: a figure silhouetted against the rising sun, a backpack at their feet and their hand raised towards the sky, captioned, "Somewhere, I will find you again, because I finally felt something." Because of the vanishment of Voice, the study came to an abrupt end, and the researchers were forced to admit defeat in ever finding the wayward twin ever again after several years of only finding graffiti much like Voice's and never the artist. The biography's title comes from the researchers' conclusion that there might be more to the Xasínan altruism and linking together than just mere socialization and culture. The conclusion is drawn that perhaps, there really is always someone out there haunted by never quite meeting someone they were meant to find -- and that these Trace-less Voices, as it were, need to be helped, not scorned as socially inept or incapable of love, for even criminals might just be searching for something they lost. Category:Ealdremen Books Category:Xasína Category:No Spoilers